Two writers whose roots are in the subcontinent but whose lucent visions transcend geography

Amid all the brouhaha surrounding the explosion of writing in English from the Indian subcontinent--the million-dollar advances won by Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie, the 36 languages into which Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things has been translated--it's easy to feel that the all-purpose label of "Anglo-Indian" writing covers a multitude of sins and that too many serious craftsmen are being massed under the Orientalist tent. Abraham Verghese's vision, full of the earnest self-inquiry of a foreigner taking America to his heart, might seem as alien to Romesh Gunesekera as Gunesekera's wrenching, elegiac tales, fragrant with the sea air of...